Map - Kaluga Oblast (Kaluzhskaya Oblast’)

Kaluga Oblast (Kaluzhskaya Oblast’)

Kaluga Oblast (Калу́жская о́бласть, Kaluzhskaya oblast) is a federal subject of Russia (an oblast). Its administrative center is the city of Kaluga. The 2010 Russian Census found a population of 1,010,930.

Kaluga Oblast lies in the central part of the East European Plain. The oblast's territory is located between the Central Russian Upland (with and average elevation of above 200 m and a maximum elevation of 275 m in the southeast), the Smolensk–Moscow Upland and the Dnieper–Desna watershed. Most of the oblast is occupied by plains, fields and forests with diverse flora and fauna. The administrative center is located on the Baryatino-Sukhinichy plain. The western part of the oblast — located within the drift plain — is dominated by the Spas-Demensk ridge. To the south is an outwash plain that is part of the Bryansk-Zhizdra woodlands, with average elevation up to 200 m.

From north to south, Kaluga Oblast extends for more than 220 km, from 53°30′ to 55°30′ northern altitude, and east to west – for 220 km. Its area is 29,800 km².

The oblast's territory is crossed by major international motor and railways, linking Kaluga with Moscow, Bryansk, Kyiv, Lviv and Warsaw.

Hyperlink

Country - Russia

Russia, officially the Russian Federation , is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. At 17125200 km2, Russia is by far or by a considerable margin the largest country in the world by area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with about 146.77 million people, including Crimea. About 77% of the population live in the western, European part of the country. Russia's capital, Moscow, is one of the largest cities in the world and the second largest city in Europe; other major cities include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both with Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U.S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait. However, Russia recognises two more countries that border it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia.

The East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, the medieval state of Rus arose in the 9th century. In 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus' ultimately disintegrated into a number of smaller states; most of the Rus' lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion and became tributaries of the nomadic Golden Horde in the 13th century. The Grand Duchy of Moscow gradually reunified the surrounding Russian principalities and achieved independence from the Golden Horde. By the 18th century, the nation had greatly expanded through conquest, annexation, and exploration to become the Russian Empire, which was the third largest empire in history, stretching from Poland on the west to Alaska on the east.